Tom Six made a pop-culture phenomenon out of a premise most people couldn't say aloud. Seventeen years later, he can't get anyone to watch his new movie.
Six's 2009 cult breakout, "The Human Centipede," unnerved a lot of people. To its detractors it was violence for violence's sake, its imagery grounds for censorship or an outright ban. The film reached the mainstream on the strength of that premise alone: a deranged surgeon abducts a handful of strangers and stitches them together, mouth to anus, into a single new creature. Two sequels followed, both of which make the original look positively neutered.
His latest, "The Onania Club," wrapped production in 2019. It has been looking for a distributor ever since.
The black-and-white film follows Hanna (Jessica Morris), a married mother who discovers she can only be aroused by the suffering of others. That leads her to the Onania Club, where wealthy Los Angeles women gather to watch footage of tragedy — including the 9/11 attacks — for sexual gratification.
Nobody wants to touch it. And it isn't for lack of an audience: horror fans have been waiting on the film for seven years.
Speaking to THR, Six describes an industry that has stopped asking whether a film is good and started asking whether it is safe.
Film distribution today has become about: does the film have the right message, will it scare anyone off, does it send the wrong signal? Will our company look bad if we release it?
What distributors fear, in his telling, is the response.
They are afraid of the backlash, the hashtag uprisings and digital pitchforks. If a filmmaker — one who has already created a pop culture phenomenon — literally gives his life for his film, wouldn't they realize that they're dealing with something truly unique and at least consider releasing it? Then they would have a hit and I can rest in peace.
He has no patience for the explanation he says he's been given for seven years — that the market has changed. He calls it "a fucking agenda," an industry code word for cowardice dressed up as conscience.
Woke is the biggest enemy of art. [The Onania situation] is the same reason why bold cinema is dying.
Now 53, Six has multiple sclerosis, which he attributes in part to the stress of the last seven years. He has made a self-produced black-and-white documentary about the experience, "The End of Tom Six," and says he has made his peace with the likelihood that "The Onania Club" will not be seen in his lifetime.
100 percent. I have always said that. Long after I am dead, they will celebrate “The Onania Club” for the powerful, sharp satire it is and my balls to create it.
A handful of people have seen it. The film was screened selectively via online links in 2020, and five reviews were filed on Rotten Tomatoes — all of them positive. Among the few who got access was John Waters, who named it one of the best films of the year, adding this passage:
The Human Centipede director tops himself with a story of rich Los Angeles women who gather together to masturbate while watching news footage of the world’s misery. Often wrongheaded but sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, it has been rejected by film distributors worldwide. All I can say is that the movie sure as hell delivers. You will probably never be able to see it. Maybe that’s a good thing…
Six's work has always sat outside the usual apparatus for judging movies. Roger Ebert declined to assign the first "Centipede" a star rating at all, writing that the film occupied a world where the stars don't shine.
The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don’t shine.
"The Onania Club" has ended up somewhere further out still — not unrated, but unreleased, and by Six's reckoning unreleasable until he's gone.
Takashi Yamazaki isn't wasting any time. "Godzilla Minus Zero" hasn't even opened yet (it arrives November 6), and he's already readying his next move: his first major studio picture, "Grandgear."